2025: The Word in the Stone
Jun 01, 2025
In the spring of 2018 I experienced a powerful, unusual moment of wonder, an encounter with the Hidden God in the form of a stone. There had stood for many years, in front of the main portal of the abbatial church, a scaffolding with an enclosed structure at the top, where George Carpenter toiled unseen, season after season, carving the tympanum. Most afternoons during this time, one could sit on the steps outside the Gatehouse and listen to the rhythm of thoughtful silence punctuated at intervals by the staccato hammering of a pneumatic chisel and the attendant racket of the large air compressor kicking on. With each new trip to Oklahoma my curiosity to see inside this space, and to see the work, grew stronger and stronger, but always the enclosure was there, its edges butted tightly up against the facade of the church. Finally I could stand it no longer.
One morning, in the lull between the end of breakfast and the time when people generally begin showing up for Terce and High Mass, I climbed the scaffolding, slid aside the trap door, and pulled myself up into George’s studio. The space was narrow, suspended just above the abbey’s threshold, with a plank floor, a rough bench pressed against the rear wall, opposite the long, open side that fronted the great semi-circle of limestone being carved. The jumble of tools and dust and protective gear and the odd paper coffee cup all felt very familiar to me, akin to my own pottery studio at home in the way that all artist’s studios are vaguely similar. I even had some idea of what to expect from the tympanum itself. I knew from conversations with George that he was working from French Romanesque references, and that the subject matter was Christ in Glory with the Four Evangelists, but confronted now with the work itself, at that exact moment in its progress, I was awestruck.
Light crept in between the edges of the plywood and the yellow brick of the church, falling gently upon the partially completed vision: A band of rosettes framed the arch, beneath which the winged beasts of Revelation looked to be nearly finished, Matthew and John holding blank banderoles, still awaiting their sacred text. And at the center: Christ. Or rather, the promise of Christ.
His form had been roughed in—crowned, enthroned, book in hand, blessing extended—but none of the beautiful detail imparted to the rest of the scene had yet been applied to Christ. On the very front of His face (or where His face would eventually be) remained a strip of the block’s flat, original surface. I would later learn the reason for this, but at the time I was struck by the resemblance of that uncarved face to the Host itself: blank, humble, hiding the fullness of divinity beneath a veil of silence. Here, too, was the God who conceals His glory under the appearance of bread—now waiting, patient in stone, for the hands of a quiet craftsman, a blacksmith turned self-taught sculptor, to show Him to the world anew. It was not just beauty I encountered, but a theology of form, an unexpected material meditation. And in that hidden studio, filled with dust and morning light, I glimpsed the mystery at the heart of all sacred art. The artist, in shaping the visible, dares to touch the invisible.
